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The Problem

Very little academic attention -- either scientific or historical -- has been paid to the crucial-to-genealogy questions of exactly how, why, and when the custom of surnames for everyone came into common use. The issue is complicated;  many variations on naming practices exist around the world.

• Some cultures, e.g., Indonesia, do not use surnames at all. A single name suffices.
• Some cultures put the family name first in the order of names.
• Some cultures are matrilineal; the mother's name is the family designator.
• Some cultures use strict patronymics, sometimes naming the grandfather as well as the father. In these cases, the name changes every generation.
• In some places, a "farm name" was used. A man marrying into a farm-owning family would adopt their name as his.

Yet, answers to the question of when a culture adopted inherited family names establish the beginning of the genealogical time frame (GTF) in which it's possible to specifically identify one's ancestors.

Unfounded speculation abounds, usually unsupported by any basis . Also in great supply are vague generalities, without adequate detail to aid understanding. This is an attempt to posit a theory capable of being tested by evidence and sufficiently "fleshed out" to enable comprehension of the process.

We focus here primarily on England & English surnames, for these reasons:

1. To reduce the scope of our examination to a manageable size.
2. Because Taylor is primarily of English origin, deriving from the French "tailleur".

We are also interested in surname use by commoners. As we'll see, surnames for the high-born did not necessarily mean the common people used them. However for surnames to become a universal phenomenon, it is essential that the lower 90% of the population have them.

England was subject to influence by other cultures; we'll mention those influences to paint the picture. 

Main Hypothesis

A name is a label attached to a person to identify him or her. Names appear to have been used to tell one person from another for many millennia and are used in most cultures. On the other hand,.surnames (i.e., inherited family names) are today universal in Western culture, but  it was not always so.

Naming practices are  culturally defined. They are outgrowths of traditions modified by social, economic and political conditions.  When changes occur in the naming practices of a culture, we must look to changes in conditions for explanations.

We posit that surnames for commoners (not merely the nobility) arose in England from social & economic turmoil following the Black Death, the pandemic of bubonic plague that ravaged Europe in 1348 and 1349. Subsequent waves of the same disease kept recurring until the 1700s. This led to greater and heretofore unknown freedom of movement and employment for commoners and growth of a middle class of artisans and merchants. Family names became a necessary means for government to maintain control of the populace -- with tax collection and criminal identification being among the motives.

The push for commoners' surnames comes largely in the aftermath of the Plague (Yersinia pestis), which killed one-third or more of Europe's population in the mid- to late-1300s and severely disrupted the social and economic orders.

• As the disease killed so many laborers and their masters, wages grew and laborers (previously bound to the land.) became free to seek employment elsewhere.
• People began to move from centuries-old locations to new places where they weren't known.
  • Some of this movement was to escape the plague itself.
  • More occurred as laborers sought better opportunities and -- for the first time -- had the freedom to do so.
  • Unlike prior migrations of entire clans or tribes together, these were individuals and small families moving at random.
• This phenomenon worried the governing class. The existing social order was threatened.
• Taxation became difficult; clerks needed to distinguish between one John and another.

The chief argument for this theory is that the movement to universal surnames (i.e., for commoners) comes immediately on the heels of the Plague.

Exceptions to the hypothesis

There are some specific surnames which do not fit the theory. An example is "Dangerfield", which may derive from D'Angervil, a family of Norman nobility who accompanied William the Conqueror and received vast estates from him.

Secondary Hypothesis

Surnames for commoners were a consequence of their increased freedom. When they were not free to change residence or employment, surnames were unnecessary. As they gained freedom (by grant or taking) surnames became essential.

Competing Theories

Other theories attribute the move toward universal surnames to:

• Population growth, &/or
• Urbanization

Both theories imply a very gradual process, taking place over a century or more. We believe that each factor played a part but do not go far enough in explaining the dynamics of the change.

Arguing against the population growth theory is that the move to universal surnames comes immediately after the greatest depopulation event in European history and that it's fast; the change is almost complete for England and Lowland Scotland in just five decades.

Arguing against the urbanization theory is that the Plague devastated cities -- due to their unsanitary conditions and ports -- more than the countryside. London for example, had a pre-plague population of 70,000, of whom 30,000 died in those two years.

Setting the Stage

Social constructs often do not arise spontaneously, but are borrowed by one culture from another. Anthropologists rely on this principle to determine that there was contact between two peoples.

Following traditions of their Germanic and Frankish ancestors, early medieval Europeans didn't use surnames; only the rich and aristocratic had them -- and, most often, not all of those. Surnames, passed down from father to children through many generations, came into general use in Europe no earlier than the mid-1300s. By 1400, they were common throughout most of Europe .

The word comes from the French "surnom", meaning literally a name written above or over the given name, a practice found in ancient parish records. Most of these names, however, are not not true family names, but simple descriptors or bynames.

In most of the world, only a single name was used to identify a person, making it possible to to focus on the exceptions.

First users of inherited family names

The first people known to adopt the practice of family names were the Chinese (though they and other Asians place them first). According to legend, Emperor Fushi (Fu Xi) decreed the use of family names about 2852 BC. The Chinese family name was one of 438 words in the sacred poem, Po-Chia-Hsing. The next name denotes the generation and is taken from a poem of 30 characters adopted by each family. Finally, comes the given name. (See source.)

Modern Chinese surnames number about 3,100, much reduced from the 12,000 used in the past. (Source.) The 5 most common surnames – Zhang, Wang, Li, Zhao and Chen are shared by 350 million people.

Ancient Greece

The Greeks are reported to have been less interested in genealogy. The Greeks had clan names, but they were seldom used. The clan of Alexander the Great, for example, was said to descend from Heracles.

The Romans

Early Romans used only one name, but later went to three or even four. (See source: Novaroma or source: Behind the Name.) The given name (praenomen) came first, then a clan designation (nomen) and then the family (cognomen). Some Romans added a fourth name, the "agnomen," to commemorate an illustrious action, or remarkable event. As the Empire declined, Romans went back to one name; the three-name practice had gone away before Constantine. (Source)

Byzantine Empire

The Armenian military aristocracy serving the late Byzantine Empire used inherited family names. They began to appear in the 8th century and were pervasive by the 11^th century.  (Source)

The Byzantine Imperial family also used an inherited family name at the time of the First Crusade and before. Emperor Alexios I Kommenos was was the nephew of Isaac I  Kommenos, who ruled 157-1059 and whose brother refused the throne. Alexios' nine children were also known by the surname or a variation of it.

Venice

The Venetian aristocracy adopted hereditary family names by 1000 AD. During the Crusades (beginning in 1095), Venice became a major staging point for Crusaders' travel to and from the Holy Land. Crusaders returning from the wars through Venice noticed and began to spread the practice throughout Europe. See endnote below.

Early Middle Age Europeans

In the early Middle Ages, most Europeans had only a single, given name -- a Frankish, Angle & Saxon  custom -- but gradually the practice of adding a second name to distinguish individuals gained popularity. By about 1100, a second name for the upper classes had become usual practice. But these descriptive names largely did not apply to families and were not inherited.

Byname -- the hereditary surname's predecessor

In mid-medieval times, a "byname" was common. Think of it as a surname that was not hereditary; a father might have one byname, his son another and his brother yet a third.

We may also think of the byname as a transitional form because many bynames became hereditary surnames. Perhaps, its closest modern equivalent is a nickname.

Surnames in 11th Century England

1066 is the great dividing year of this century, when England passed from mostly Anglo-Saxon control to strict Norman rule under William I. The short story is that the William and his Normans invaded, defeated the Anglo-Saxons, crushed all resistance and instituted a rigid feudal system.

According to "A history of British surnames" by Richard Alexander McKinley:

Anglo-Saxons

The Angles, Saxons and Jutes -- who had conquered much of Britain by 1000 AD -- used a single name.

Normans

The Normans were -- ethnically Danes -- who had relocated to northwestern France in the 9^th century. Most of these transplanted Vikings had taken up French ways by the time William invaded England. Their adventures were not confined to the British Isles; they also were a major force in the Mediterranean.

Name history differs by class.

At this point, we need to distinguish between social and economic classes, as the histories of surnames are radically different for nobility as compared to commoners:

• Nobility:

  The practice of hereditary family names began slowly among the titled, land-holding classes and gradually gained acceptance over centuries. This was a small fraction of the total population, but the portion most likely to have been recorded in writing. Most of these nobles were Norman; only a few of the Anglo-Saxons defeated at the Battle of Hastings were allowed to keep titles and lands. 
   

• Commoners:

  The names of commoners were so infrequently recorded that few records exist before parish registration began in 1538. However, it appears that -- when they are identified -- it is almost invariably with a byname, such as "the butcher", "of {village}", "the blonde".
   
    Apparently, almost no commoners, including freemen and burgesses, had surnames before the Black Plague (AKA, the Great Pestilence) but all or almost all had them only five decades later. Though they made up 90% or more of England's population, surviving records of them from before 1353 are rare.
   

• Middle Class:

  A middle class, between nobles and peasants, was almost non-existent in the  feudal system, though perhaps we may put knights (whose titles were not hereditary) into this group. A few freemen and burgesses (town-dwellers) had some rights not enjoyed by serfs.

The Normans may have introduced the surname practice to England with their 1066 conquest. William I (the Conqueror) imposed a feudal system on the conquered territory and awarded most of the land to his chief lieutenants -- cleverly scattering their holdings so as as to prevent evolution of large territories antithetical to his rule.. By most reports, William regarded his title as Duke of Normandy more important than that of King of England. Similarly, his barons tended to be absentee landlords, with their hearts (& often presences) more in France than in England.

Sidelight: The absentee landlord nature of Norman & early Plantagenet rule made English governance unique in Europe and had its benefits for historians and genealogists. The situation meant that local governance had to be recorded in writing, so reports (from the "Shire Reeve" or Sheriff)  could be sent to the lord who was not on scene to see for himself. Further, the bulky records could not be carried easily from place to place, so local centers of government became necessary.

Medieval Social Structure

English feudal society had a rigid caste system, described in its Elizabethan form here:

• At the top were "gentlemen" -- "..the first and chief (next the king) be the prince, dukes, marquesses, earls, viscounts, and barons; and these are called gentlemen of the greater sort, or (as our common usage of speech is) lords and noblemen: and next unto them be knights, esquires, and, last of all, they that are simply called gentlemen."
   
• Also in this class -- "bishops, who are accounted honourable, called lords, and hold the same room in the Parliament house with the barons"
   
• Knights were a special case -- "Knights be not born, neither is any man a knight by succession, no, not the king or prince: but they are made either before the battle, to encourage them the more to adventure and try their manhood; or after the battle ended, as an advancement for their courage and prowess already shewed.."
   
• Next were citizens or burgesses, who "have next place to gentlemen, who be those that are free within the cities, and are of some likely substance to bear office in the same." Merchants were also recognized as citizens.
   
• Yeomen "are those which by our law are called Legales homines, free men born English, and may dispend of their own free land in yearly revenue.."
   
• Artificers & laborers -- "The fourth .. sort of people in England are day-labourers, poor husbandmen, and some retailers (which have no free land) copyholders, and all artificers, as tailors, shoemakers, carpenters, brickmakers, masons, etc."
   
• In Elizabeth's reign,, serfs were free (She ended the last vestiges of the system.), so Harrison was able to brag, "As for slaves and bondmen, we have none; nay, such is the privilege of our country by the especial grace of God and bounty of our princes, that if any come hither from other realms, so soon as they set foot on land they become so free of condition as their masters".
  However, there had previously been several classes of peasant:
  • Freemen, free tenants, were tenant farmers, much like modern share-croppers who pay rent by a share of the crops. The 1086 term encompassed some lesser Normans as occasionally noted in the records.
  • Villeins were the most common class of serf. They had more rights than those below them, but they could not leave and the lord owned their labor whenever he required it. They had grants for some land they could farm for themselves, but they were also required to work the lord's land. They had no property of their own, a villein owned "only his belly";.
  • Bordars & cottars ranked just below villeins. They consisted largely of second & third sons of villeins, were granted just enough land to feed a family and were required to work specified days of the week for the lord.
  • Slaves had few rights and no land, surviving entirely on donations from the lord. They could be beaten for running away.
    

  Domesday: 1086/1087

  By the time of the Domesday Book some wealthy landowners in England had surnames. We have found among those named at least three men (all Norman noblemen) and two with brothers or fathers who bore the same second name. Most at this time are known either by their titles, their birthplaces, their French estates or a nickname . (The Earl of Chester was nicknamed Hugh Lupus, "Hugh the Wolf", for his treatment of the Welsh.)

  • The Domesday Book lists only landholders by name. Freemen, burgesses, peasants and serfs of various classes are counted by household, but not named. (These commoners received about the same attention as plows & livestock.)
  • The overwhelming majority of the landholders (tenants-in-chief and under-tenants) are Norman noblemen, many with vast estates in several counties. A few are Anglo-Saxons (including the family of the defeated Alfred the Great) and Danes.
  • Most of the names appear to be titles or bynames. Hugh is described only as the "Earl of Chester". Others are designated by their places of birth. At least two, however, (Roger Bigot, Roger Malet) have what may be inherited family names, in that a father or brother shares the second name and another man (Walter Tyrel) bears what may be a surname.
  • While sometimes described as "The First Census", the purpose of the Domesday Book appears to be two-fold
    1. As a tax list & survey to determine the resources of England to support taxation. (In order to fund resistance to the expected invasion from Denmark.) and
    2. To establish property rights.
  • The Domesday Book, commissioned by William the Conqueror in December 1085, was compiled in a multi-stage procedure.
    1. Records from the time of Alfred the Great were assembled systematically.
    2. These were compared with post-1066 grants by William.
    3. Groups of commissioners were directed to verify & correct the resulting reports. They traveled to the sites, interviewed residents, and visually observed the facts. (Counts of plows, for example, assessed the amount of land farmed.) The commissioners' reports were final; there was no appeal, thus the "Doomsday" connotation.
    4. The commissioners' reports were abstracted & compiled by a single scribe with the assistance of a proofreader.
  • The "Great Domesday Book" consists of 413 pages of these compiled abstracts. The "Little Domesday Book" consists of 475 pages of the commissioners' detail for the counties of Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk -- the final locations for the commissioners' work. These were apparently not turned over to the scribe for compilation after William died in 1087.
  • The Book (taking both together) is not complete; London, Winchester & Northumbria, for example, are not listed. However, 13,418 locations in 40 of the ancient counties of England are listed.

  (See sources: Domesday Book UK, Wikipedia, and David Roffe, Domesday expert.)

  For our purposes, the Domesday Book tells us that the practice of inherited family names may have started among the Norman nobility by the end of the 11^th century, but it was not especially common even in that class. It tells us nothing about surname practices among the unnamed lower classes except -- by implication -- that they were deemed unworthy of notice.

  However, the entry for the fishing port of Dunwich, Suffolk (held by Roger Malet, one of our three with possible surnames) counts a number of (French) "free men". In this brief mention, we see the beginnings of a middle class which may be an important factor in surname practices.

{The feudal} system had its unique terms. Its Norman (Anglo-French) name was "villeiny" (with an e, not an a) and those bound by it were "villeins" who lived in "vills"; their status was "villeinage". Villeins, among the lowest classes of English society,  were considered free in most respects but obliged to remain on the lords' land and to work it when and as he demanded. {See "The Invention of Free Labor: The Employment Relation in English and American Law and Culture, 1350-1870", Robert J. Steinfeld; University of North Carolina Press, 1991.}

Coincidentally, the words "villain" & "villainy", in their present meanings, first appeared in the 14^th century, right about the time villeins gained freedom from their lords. Some, losing the security of villeinage, turned to crime for survival.

Plague Strikes. The most noteworthy development  of this century -- surpassing even the beginning of the Hundred Years' War -- was the Black Plague striking England (and most of Europe) in 1348. The first pandemic lasted until 1349, and recurred several times during the next few centuries. We'll review the plague and its effects in more detail below, but it had lasting  consequences -- social, political, cultural and economic.

Commoners get names

One consequence of interest to the genealogist was the rapid adoption of surnames. One (unconfirmed) story is that Edward III issued a decree in 1353 for the benefit of his local tax collectors (The timing, five years after plague onset, is about right.), requiring that all persons in his realm without a surname take one for them and their children to be known by ever after.

This story may be apocryphal; there may not have been a royal decree or an act of Parliament. (We have not found one.) It may have been that local authorities took on their own the issuance of mandates. Yet, the change seems rapid for such a dramatic departure from previous practice.

Records for commoners are sparse but before 1349 we see no written mentions of these folks which could be reasonably interpreted as giving an inherited family name to the low-born.

On 10 Nov. 1367, an apprentice, Richard Wasshelyn, filed a bill of complaint to a London court against his master, a grocer named John Hatfeld. This may be the first writing of surnames for common people.

By the 1370s, the word "surname" begins appearing in official documents, indicating general acceptance.

Geoffrey Chaucer, the poet, is an interesting case in this examination. Born in 1307 and living until 1381, his life straddles the Plague's worst years. His social class, too, is "in-between" -- neither noble nor peasant. He started as the son of a well-off family of London vintners, whose previous generations had been Ipswich merchants. At age 14, his father's connections helped him land a job as page to a Countess and that led him, eventually, to become an important official in the courts of Edward III & Richard II. We do not know whether he or his father is identified as Chaucer (from the French for shoemaker) before 1349.

If adoption of surnames hadn't become universal by the end of Edward III's reign, the Poll Tax of 1377 hastened the process. This was an annual tax of four pence per year on every male and female older than fourteen. To assure its collection and administration, surnames for all would have been necessary.

In 1385, Richard II issued "An Act regarding Fugitive Villeins", demonstrating that serfs deserting the manors for freedom was a problem worthy of royal notice.

15th Century: 1400-1499

By 1400, historians concur, most families in England and the Scottish Lowlands had surnames. We may regard this as the completion of the process.

Later adopters

Above, we've reviewed how surnames reached English commoners following the 1348 onset of the Plague. In Cromwell's time, the English imposed the practice on Ireland, as a means of gaining control over the rebellious Irish.

Highland Scots: "The use of fixed Scottish surnames occasionally show up as early as the 10th or 12th centuries, but only begin to appear more often during the 16th century. However, this practice was slow to 'catch on', and it took up until the late 18th and early 19th century to spread to the Highlands and northern isles." (Source)

Among the people late to adopt surnames universally were the Dutch. It wasn't until Napoleon conquered the Netherlands and mandated surnames that Hollanders took them, reluctantly. A "name lottery" was conducted in 1811.

Scandinavians clung to their strict patronymic (& "farm name") system until the early 20^th century. Norway did not required fixed surnames until 1923.

Parish Registers:

Parish registers are of immense genealogical and historical importance. They begin in England with the 5 September 1538 order by Henry VIII's Vicar General, Thomas Cromwell, that each parish priest keep a book, entering all baptisms, marriages and burials of the previous week. The order was repeated in in 1547 and the form of the recordings was specified in 1598, but not enforced until 1603 due to cost. Many of the earlier recordings had been on scraps of paper, easily lost and subject to deterioration; the new form was to be "great decent books of parchment".

During the English Civil War of 1643-1647 and the following religious turmoil, many of the books were hidden or destroyed. From 1653 to 1660,civil authorities took over the work, but handed back the books back to the clergy after the Restoration of 1660.

How dramatic was the Plague and its after-effects?

It's almost impossible for us to now imagine the impact of the "Black Death" -- "Great Pestilence" or "Great Mortality" as it was known then -- on the people and society of medieval Europe. It was "death coming ..like black smoke". No one knew the causes and there was no cure. (Neither cause nor cure would be identified until 1900.) A carved inscription for the year 1349 at St. Mary's in Ashwell, Hertfordshire says:

"Wretched, terrible, destructive year, the remnants of the people alone remain."

In mid to late June of 1348, a ship from Gascony docked in Weymouth. Hiding between & under the wine casks in its cargo holds, were rats who left the ship bearing fleas. And those fleas carried a deadly infectious bacteria. The fleas got the disease from feeding on infected rats; when the rats died, the fleas moved on to live hosts and infected them with bites. The disease spread like a nuclear chain reaction, gathering speed and destructive power with each new cycle of transmission.

Not all researchers accept Yersinia pestis as the infectious agent. Some say that it was anthrax, others a filovirus, similar to the Ebola virus. However, the reported symptoms and progression appear to most closely resemble those of Y. pestis infection.

The genome of this ancient Y. Pestis has recently been sequenced. You can read the article here. As the samples were obtained from skeletal remains of mid-14^th century burials, the infectious agent appears confirmed.

Bristol was struck early, followed closely by other ports and then inland areas. News traveled slowly; the disease arrived in place after place almost without warning. 

I

Predisposing conditions

The Plague came on the heels of widespread famine; the people were weakened and more susceptible. It had been a very wet year and crops lay un-harvested and rotting in the fields, encouraging rat multiplication. Rats, of course, were common in most households and flea bites hardly noticed. (Even today, only 10% of plague victims report being bitten by a flea.) The peasants were, perhaps, in their worst state of centuries; their repression had steadily increased since the Conquest.

Population had been on the increase. England may have held as many as six million people, many crowding into the cities. This meant that famine, when it came, would be more severe.

Sanitation was virtually unknown. Chamber pots were emptied into streets filled with rotting garbage. Flies infested open markets. Wells were polluted. Bathing was an infrequent practice.

This happened several centuries before the germ theory of disease was developed. The only prevention measures taken were quarantines (ineffective against the rats).

Symptoms

Within 2 to 5 days after a flea bite, victims would start experiencing chills, general malaise, high fevers, muscle pain, severe headaches, seizures, and bubos -- swelling of the lymph glands, which then turned black.

Those who breathed in the bacteria, would have symptoms within 2-3 days -- difficulty breathing, severe cough and frothy & bloody sputum. Reports are that many died within "a few hours of taking their beds".

Mortality & Morbidity

The actual mortality rate of the English population was not well-recorded at the time and is still in dispute; some think as "little" as one-third, some say one-half and others put the figure higher. Even the lowest estimates represent an immense calamity.

Nor is "decimation" the right word. Decimation takes only 10% of a population; the Plague was much worse than that.

At least three of every seven Londoners died, at one point two hundred per day. Some villages were wiped off the map entirely. In many places there weren't enough healthy people to care for the sick and the dead. Cemeteries were opened with mass graves and almost immediately filled.

The poor (90% of the people) suffered most, but the rich weren't completely spared. King Edward III lost a sister to the plague. In Bristol, 15 of the 52 town counselors died. Three Archbishops of Canterbury died in rapid succession.

The plague comes in three forms, depending on the infection site:

1. Bubonic -- Infection occurs in the lymph nodes. Bubos or pustules form and turn black; the "shilling in the arm-pit.". Presently, 80-95% of about 2,800 worldwide plague cases per year are bubonic. From exposure to symptoms is a period of 2 to 6 days. Mortality rate without treatment is 50-90%.
    
2. Pneumonic -- Infection occurs in the lungs, perhaps from inhaling bacteria-laden dust or droplets from others' coughing. Death is even more certain and rapid than in the bubonic variety. This form is reported to have become more prevalent in the winter of 1348-1349.
    
3. Septicemic -- Infection in the bloodstream. Relatively rare, this form seems not to have been prevalent in the 14^th century.

Some recovered; today's bubonic plague (perhaps, less virulent) is 40% to 60% fatal without treatment. Some did not get sick; a genetic immunity has been recently discovered. Survivors may have passed the immunity to their offspring.

More waves: A 1361/1362 recurrence is said to have killed 20% -- a horrible figure but less than the first event. It may have come from bacteria spores re-activated after lying dormant in soil or dust. It would keep coming back, the 1660s wave leading to Daniel Defoe's "Journal of the Plague Years".

Emotional aspects

"We see death coming into our midst like black smoke, a plague which cuts off the young, a rootless phantom which has no mercy or fair countenance. Woe is me of the shilling in the arm-pit; it is seething, terrible, wherever it may come, a head that gives pain and causes a loud cry, a burden carried under the arms, a painful angry knob, a white lump. It is of the form of an apple, like the head of an onion, a small boil that spares no-one. Great is its seething, like a burning cinder, a grievous thing of an ashy colour. It is an ugly eruption that comes with unseemly haste. It is a grievous ornament that breaks out in a rash. The early ornaments of black death."
(Jeuan Gethin, Welsh poet, d. Spring 1349)

People were falling all around; they might seem healthy one day and dead the next. So many died, so rapidly; no one knew if they would be next or how long they might have. No one knew if the devastation would end, or even slow. This engendered a "live for the moment" attitude and a disregard for long-term consequences.

"...Such fear and fanciful notions took possession of the living that almost all of them adopted the same cruel policy, which was entirely to avoid the sick and everything belonging to them. By so doing, each one thought he would secure his own safety." (Source)

In this deeply religious culture, worse than the fear of dying was fear of dying without salvation and thus condemning one's soul to eternal damnation. Many didn't survive long enough to confess or undergo last rites.  England, however, did not undergo the rise of extreme cults such as the flagellants seen in other afflicted countries. Officials treated it as a disease, yet one they were powerless against.

Fear officially reached Parliament in January 1349. It was told  that: "the plague and deadly pestilence had suddenly broken out in the said place and the neighbourhood, and daily increased in severity so that grave fears were entertained for the safety of those coming here at the time."

Religion

The Plague is sometimes cited as a cause of the Reformation. The Church rested on the efforts and abilities of local parish priests, whose sacramental& duties exposed them greatly to pneumonic infection. Even early in the pandemic, it took four to six weeks to appoint a priest's successor, leaving the parish without leadership. Later, many rapidly- but poorly-trained priests were unable to inspire the same confidence of the congregations and trust was lost.

Economic, social & political effects

Perhaps the first effect was temporary suspension of the Hundred Years' War. England's army, so reliant on its yeomen bowmen and infantry, could not take the field. France, suffering equally, could not press for advantage.

Above we saw that -- before the Plague -- peasants were still bound to the land and to their lords. Bound labor would quickly be replaced by hired labor. The agriculture-based economy was highly dependent on its farm laborers, who made up the overwhelming majority of the population and whose ranks were thinned the most. So long as their number was great, their desires could be ignored. Now, the few of them left were in short supply and great demand.

"The Black Death broke the established social order and weakened serfdom." (Source)

Andrews' History of England: "The fearful disease spared no class of society, but fell most heavily upon the artisans in the towns, the agricultural laborers in the country, the monks, and the parish priests."

Evidence for the Plague's economic impact is the 1349 Ordinance of Labourers, which became the 1351 Statute of Labourers and was re-enacted several times subsequently. These acts attempted (without much success) to hold wages to pre-Plague 1346 levels. It should be no surprise that the statute was passed by a Parliament consisting mostly of landowners seeking to maximize profits by holding down costs. Text of the Ordinance can be found here; among its provisions:

• Workers receiving higher wages were subject to imprisonment;
• Employers paying higher wages were subject to fines of treble the wages paid.

The point bears emphasizing:
    The system of serf labor had collapsed. These laws would be unneeded if workers still felt bound to the land and to their lords. Workers would have had no power to negotiate.

To draw a modern analogy, it was as if the landholders collectively adopted a "salary cap" system like those of professional sports leagues and then each owner individually set about manipulating the cap for the benefit of his own team, thus destroying  it.

Let us also note that collapse of serfdom was rapid and lasting. The Ordinance was decreed while the Plague still raged, its Statute successor two years later. Continuing reenactments show the "labor problem" persisted. King and Parliament were powerless against the economic law of supply and demand.

More evidence that the statute didn't work and laborers were faring better than before comes from Geoffrey Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales". in which the commoners are dressing above their stations.

Priests and monks were hit especially hard; the ranks of the Church were decimated. To replace them, less able and less trained men were recruited. Some attribute this decline in the quality of the clergy for the forces leading eventually to the Reformation.

Where people had previously been moving to the cities & towns for opportunity, they now fled them in fear. Laborers, too, moved to new locations for better wages, if not for health.  A vast in-country migration took place and local officials could scarcely keep track. Manors, villages and parishes which before knew everyone in them now were flooded with suspect strangers.

To draw the contrast starkly:

• Pre-plague, manorial England was settled England. Each person knew and kept his or her place. The few who rebelled could be easily dealt with.
   
• Post-plague England was unsettled and chaotic -- especially discomforting to those whose duty it was to know every person's place and keep them in it.

Policing, taxing, all functions of government became more difficult. To the medieval mind, an unknown stranger represented a threat. Surnames were a way to make the strangers known.

Final note

It is surprising how little shrift historians pay to the calamitous events of 1348/1349. Perhaps, it's because the Plague affected mainly the un-named; only a few of the great lords succumbed and none "consequential"; it thus does not fit into the "great man" view of history. Nor, were there "great deeds" for earning honors and acclaim; it involved no heroic acts or great battles.  Perhaps, because -- in history's "rear-view mirror" -- it happened again and again.

Yet. the phenomenon was unique in its time and left its mark on all descendants of the affected areas. It was particularly deadly in its first incarnation. It engendered lasting changes in society, not the least being universal surnames.

Plague Sources:

Our plague information is compiled and interpreted from a variety of historical and medical sources, including but not limited to those below.

• Medline Plus (National Institutes for Health)
• eMedicine
• Wikipedia -- Bubonic plague
• Wikipedia -- Black Death
• Google Books: "The Black Death, 1346-1353: the complete history" by Ole Jørgen Benedictow
• Eye witness to history
• The Middle Ages.net
• E.L. Skip Knox, Boise State University
• BBC History

Summing up

We have, hopefully, shown that surname practice in England followed this progression:

• Surnames (i.e., hereditary family names) had begun in the Norman nobility by the 1086 Domesday Book and become more common among them by the 1215 Magna Carta.
• Though bynames may have been widespread, surnames were not generally used by commoners before the Plague of 1348/1349.
• The Plague of 1348/1349 -- a catastrophe of epic proportions -- was an immense upset to the old order and a threat to all social order, requiring new means of dealing with a freer population. Surnames for everyone, including commoners, was one of those means.
• There was at least some use of surnames by commoners by 1367.
• The Poll Tax, beginning in 1377, requires the ability to identify every person, in order to record who's paid and who's not. Surnames would be a critical aspect of the identification.
• Surnames were a well-established practice for everyone including commoners by 1400.

We believe the process of surname adoption by English commoners (in contrast to the nobility) was rapid, within a span of five decades or less.

• The evidence suggests that no commoners -- or almost none -- had surnames before 1349.
• It is generally accepted that almost all had surnames by 1400, a span of 51 years.
• It is likely that most had surnames by the Poll Tax of1377, a span of 28 years.

Revised:12 Dec 2012

Endnotes

1. Venice: Summing up centuries of history in a brief paragraph leaves out much; some will be explained here. It is compiled and interpreted from a variety of sources, none of which mention surnames. They include:
   • Venetian history, short articale by Tim Lambert
   • Steven Dutch, University of Wisconsin - Green Bay; “Cities such as Venice flourished as a result of the Crusaders because, people fled to Venice and it developed into a powerful city-state that came to dominate much of the Mediterranean during the Crusades.”
   • Venice's Byzantine trade;
   • Venice's role in Crusades.
   A Celtic people known as the Veneti founded a village in southern Italy in 421. In 568, the surrounding, hostile Lombards forced them to relocate to swampy islands in the bay, where they built the city we know as Venice and gained riches through the trade of silk and spices, along with rivals Genoa and Pisa. In contrast to other European cities, Venice grew and thrived in the Middle Ages. They became a "protectorate" of the Byzantine Empire until 726; they would have had Armenian soldiers guarding the city.
   When Venetians gained freedom from Constantinople, they elected their first Doge but retained friendly relations with their former rulers . During the latter half of the 11^th century, Norman raiders, in 1071, captured the last Byzantine port opening to the Mediterranean and established restrictive trade rules; in response the Emperor granted duty-free trade to Venetian merchants, further increasing the city's power.
   Venetians were active participants in the Crusades, and it was one of just three ports (others being Genoa and Pisa) through which the 30,000 infantry and 5,000 cavalry must pass. In 1204, Venice was largely responsible for the conquering of Sidon and Tyre. It continued to participate through the Fourth Crusade, in which it took Crusader help in raiding Constantinople as payment for passage.
   
   Bottom line:
   • Venetians knew the Armenian practice of surnames and apparently adopted it.
   • Crusaders got to know the Venetian practice of surnames and some apparently adopted it. Signs of having been to the Holy Land were important to Crusaders and pilgrims; they made their way into heraldic symbols such as the clamshell; a surname marked the bearer as having been through Venice.
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